The following excerpt comes from Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room by David L. Craddock.

Sickly green light washed over the stubble and pale complexion of the man hunched in front of his computer monitor. Beside it sat a television, black except for five horizontal, crimson-colored bands running from top to bottom like lines on notebook paper.

Garry Kitchen closed his eyes, but the straight red lines were burned into the backs of his eyelids. Behind him came a steady pounding: pound—pound-pound-pound. He didn’t rise to the bait. He knew what he’d see. On the arcade cabinet’s screen, a giant ape the size of King Kong had just scaled a construction site made of straight red girders. With every stomp, the platforms had twisted and bent until they were slanted like ramps. Standing tall at the top, the ape intoned his grating, mechanical laugh.

Scientists want to rip the Universe apart. At least that is what a Daily Mail headline might read. Lasers can now reach power in the petawatt range. And, when you focus a laser beam that powerful, nothing survives: all matter is shredded, leaving only electrons and nuclei.

But laser physicists haven’t stopped there. Under good experimental conditions, the very fabric of space and time are torn asunder, testing quantum electrodynamics to destruction. And a new mirror may be all we need to get there.

On average, the amount of power used by humans is about 18 terawatts. A petawatt is 1,000 times larger than a terawatt. The baddest laser on the planet (currently) produces somewhere between 5 and 10 petawatts, and there are plans on the drawing board to reach 100 petawatts in the near future. The trick is that the power is not available all the time. Each of these lasers produces somewhere between 5-5000 J of energy for a very very short time (between a picosecond—10-12s—and a few femtoseconds—10-15s). During that instant, however, the power flow is immense.

But an hour later, Ukrenergo's operators were able to simply switch the power back on again. Which raised the question: Why would Russia's hackers build a sophisticated cyberweapon and plant it in the heart of a nation's power grid only to trigger a one-hour blackout?

Camera 7.0 looks to have a much-improved and more accessible way to manage shot settings. Camera 6.x obscured these settings in several separate menus behind a bunch of tiny, unintuitive icons at the top of the viewfinder. [credit:
xda-developers.com ]

Android developer site xda-developers got its hands on a pre-release copy of the Camera app designed for Google's upcoming Pixel 4—so naturally, the site then sideloaded it on a Pixel 2XL.

The majority of the settings exposed in the screenshots already existed in Camera 6.x, but even long-time Pixel users could be forgiven for not knowing they existed. Where Camera 6.x hid them in five separate menus—each squirreled away behind a tiny, unintuitive icon at the top of the viewfinder—Camera 7.0 combines them into a single, much easier-to-read menu. This one context-sensitive settings menu (its options differ between, for example, Night Sight mode and regular Camera mode) can be accessed either by tapping a drop-down arrow or by swiping down on the viewfinder itself.

Behind the scenes, xda-developers reports finding new scene-detection code that integrates with an extended "Camera coaching" feature that offers tips for taking better pictures. If you're sick and tired of seeing "try Night Sight mode" or "try Portrait mode" popping helpfully up while taking pictures, you'll also be able to disable the feature entirely—whereas, at least so far as we can tell, in Camera 6.x you're stuck with them.

The Trump administration is sanctioning three North Korean hacking groups widely accused of carrying out attacks that targeted critical infrastructure and stole millions of dollars from banks in cryptocurrency exchanges, in part so the country could finance its weapons and missiles programs.

All three of the groups are controlled by North Korea’s primary intelligence agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, officials with the US Department of Treasury said in a statement published on Friday. Collectively, the groups are behind a host of cyber attacks designed to spy on adversaries and generate revenue for nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

“Treasury is taking action against North Korean hacking groups that have been perpetrating cyber attacks to support illicit weapon and missile programs,” Sigal Mandelker, Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in Friday’s statement. “We will continue to enforce existing US and UN sanctions against North Korea and work with the international community to improve cybersecurity of financial networks.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated and revised the national tally of illnesses linked to the use of e-cigarettes, aka vaping, dropping the count from 450 possible cases to 380 confirmed and probable cases, the agency announced late Thursday.

The new figure follows a clearer clinical definition for the illness as well as further investigation into individual cases. The 380 confirmed and probable cases now span 36 states and still include six deaths, as reported earlier. The CDC added that the current number of cases “is expected to increase as additional cases are classified.”

While health investigators are clearing the air around the clinical aspect of the cases, the cause is still foggy. Though all the cases are associated with vaping, investigators have struggled to identify specific vape products or ingredients that tie all the cases and symptoms together.

Verizon says it will bring its "5G Home" Internet service to every market where it deploys 5G mobile service.

That might not be saying much, given how limited Verizon's early 5G deployments are. But it would mean that at least some people in each 5G mobile market would be able to buy the 5G fixed Internet service, which offers an alternative to wired Internet.

"You should expect that every market that opens a 5G mobility market will in due course be a 5G fixed wireless [market] because it is one network," Verizon Consumer Group CEO Ronan Dunne said Wednesday at an investor conference (link to webcast and transcript).

FRANKFURT, GERMANY—The cars we drive are increasingly defined as much by the software they run as their engines or chassis. It started slowly. Discrete electronic control units started to appear under the hood, controlling fuel management or anti-lock brakes. New functions required new code, run on new little black boxes, metastasizing to the point where today, a new car might have up to 70 different modules, with software from as many as 200 different vendors. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it can be. Which is why Volkswagen Group—parent company to brands like VW, Audi, and Porsche—is saying "enough!"

Internal competition versus economies of scale

"Software is extremely complex nowadays. Each function is connected with everything—in the car, in the cloud, with the dealers—and we see that too many projects are in too much trouble. The process chain is not stable anymore; there's so much inefficiency to this process," explained Christian Senger, who is responsible for VW Group's Digital Car and Services division. The problem is partly one by design; Ferdinand Piech specifically wanted Audi, Porsche, and Volkswagen to each develop software independently, the idea being that internal competition could improve the breed.

But it has led to balkanization. "Today, we build more than 10 million cars a year. But they are running on roughly eight different electronic architectures. In mechanical engineering, I would call us a platform champion," Senger said, referring to VW Group's strength in using a small number of common architectures—MQB for transverse-engined vehicles, MLB Evo for premium models, and now MEB for smaller electric vehicles—across multiple brands. "We defined how global industrialization of brands and markets really works. In software, there is no reason for having eight different architectures," he said, contrasting VW Group's current situation with the Android OS, where the same software runs on $60 smartphones as well as $1,000 smartphones.

There's a new Midnight Society of scary storytellers in the Nickelodeon reboot of Are You Afraid of the Dark.

Hot on the heels of this summer's adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, Nickelodeon has dropped the first trailer for its reboot of the popular 1990s series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, featuring a group of teens telling each other scary campfire stories that then come to life.

The original Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a Canadian "dark fantasy" (aka YA horror) anthology series that aired on Nickelodeon in the US from 1990 to 1996, followed by a second run from 1999 to 2000. At the start of each episode, the members of the Midnight Society would gather around a campfire in the woods, and one member would be chosen tell a story—typically an urban legend or something involving ghosts, werewolves, vampires, witches, and the like. The storyteller would announce the title and toss a handful of "midnight dust" into the campfire—producing white smoke for extra ambience—before launching into the tale.

The rest of the episode would dramatize the story for the viewers. There was a fair share of humor mixed in with the jump scares and creepy moments, often courtesy of several colorful recurring characters like mad scientist/sorcerer Dr. Vink ("Vink. With a va-va-va!"), and magic shop owner Sardo ("No mister; accent on the doh!"). And few fans of the original series will soon forget terrifying monsters like the Ghastly Grinner.

Enlarge / The dome of the United State Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Phil Roeder)

The long summer recess for Congress is at last well and truly over. The House Judiciary Committee has ramped up for the fall season, issuing demands for huge piles of documentation from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google as its antitrust probe into Big Tech grows.

The committee launched the bipartisan inquiry in June, seeking in part to determine "whether existing laws are adequate" to the task of regulating the sprawling tech titans that power the 21st century economy. As part of that probe, the committee has now issued lengthy requests for information to the four companies digging deeply into the question of competition.

Amazon has announced that it will hold an event on September 25 to announce new hardware products. The company's invitations indicate that it will discuss "new things from the Amazon Devices and Services team" at the event.

Amazon held a similar event around the same time last year, when it announced a plethora of new devices, including a new Echo Dot, Sub, Show, and more—the majority of the Echo line was refreshed. That seems like a more likely focus for this year's event than the Fire TV, as Amazon announced new Fire TVs and a new Fire TV Cube at IFA just recently. However, Fire TV tablets are a possibility.

We're not sure whether it will be quite the gauntlet that last year's event was—Amazon announced more than a dozen products then. And there isn't a strong case to be made that the company's lineup is as in need of refreshes as it was then. But if you've bought into the Amazon ecosystem and Alexa, this is the event you'll want to keep an eye on to learn what new gear you can add to your setup.

Last week, the team behind Death Stranding discussed the game's "Very Easy Mode" publicly for the first time. The mode, according to Director Hideo Kojima's assistant Ayako Terashima, is designed for "[people] who usually don’t play game[s], movie fans or RPG fans. Normal or Hard Mode is for action game fans." Kojima later added that the new mode was designed for "movie fans since we have real actors [starring]. Even [writer Kenji Yano], who never completed the 1st stage of Pac-Man, was able to complete the game on Very Easy Mode."

But Death Stranding's Super Easy mode is part of a trend toward extreme difficulty tuning that's slowly seeping into the industry at large. And, frankly, it's a trend we hope picks up more steam going forward.

There are some people who would never buy a ThinkPad, and there are others who flock to Lenovo's flagship business family every time the company makes an update. The latest release will be no exception, even if the updates it brings are relatively small. The seventh-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon will look familiar to ThinkPad fans, and in this case, familiarity is a good thing.

Most of the improvements and updates come in optional add-ons or internal changes that make the laptop even better than it was before. We spent about a week using it to get a feel for the updates and see which (if any) are worth spending at least $1,400 to get this upgrade.

What’s new

Lenovo has typically gone against the grain with the design of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The X1 Carbon doesn't look like any other premium Windows notebook, much less any of the flagship laptops that are vying for your attention and dollars with fancy, ultra-slim profiles. The fundamentals of the X1 haven't changed, but Lenovo did make it nearly one millimeter thinner, which is a feat considering the previous model was already a svelte 15.95mm. It's also still a MIL-SPEC tested machine, so it will take up less space in your bag, but it won't crack or bend easily if that bag has an accident.

Two security contractors were arrested in Adel, Iowa on September 11 as they attempted to gain access to the Dallas County Courthouse. The two are employees of Coalfire—a "cybersecurity advisor" firm based in Westminster, Colorado that frequently does security assessments for federal agencies, state and local governments, and corporate clients. They claimed to be conducting a penetration test to determine how vulnerable county court records were and to measure law enforcement's response to a break-in.

Unfortunately, the Iowa state court officials who ordered the test never told county officials about it—and evidently no one anticipated that a physical break-in would be part of the test. For now, the penetration testers remain in jail. In a statement issued yesterday, state officials apologized to Dallas County, citing confusion over just what Coalfire was going to test:

State court administration (SCA) is aware of the arrests made at the Dallas County Courthouse early in the morning on September 11, 2019. The two men arrested work for a company hired by SCA to test the security of the court’s electronic records. The company was asked to attempt unauthorized access to court records through various means to learn of any potential vulnerabilities. SCA did not intend, or anticipate, those efforts to include the forced entry into a building. SCA apologizes to the Dallas County Board of Supervisors and law enforcement and will fully cooperate with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and Dallas County Attorney as they pursue this investigation. Protecting the personal information contained in court documents is of paramount importance to SCA and the penetration test is one of many measures used to ensure electronic court documents are secure.